What’s Wrong With Capitalism?
January and February 2000
So here we are, at the beginning of a new century, a new millennium. Will it be a new beginning or will it be more of the same? Now what do we do and where do we go from here? What’s wrong with the way things are?
What’s wrong with capitalism? What’s wrong with a few people making a lot of money from their investments in the stock market, or lots of money creating a business that creates needs and creates jobs? What’s wrong with making a large profit? What’s wrong with working hard to make lots of money? What’s wrong with not doing any work while still making lots of money? What’s wrong with buying lots of stuff to be happy? What’s wrong with believing in the American dream? What’s wrong with being motivated by one’s own economic self-interest? What’s wrong with being in the upper, upper class? What’s wrong with being privileged? What’s wrong with believing that all those in the lower, lower class are ignorant and lazy? What’s wrong with cheap labor or child labor? What’s wrong with businesses spending lots of money advertising to create huge demands for limited supplies? What’s wrong with using our natural resources to meet our human needs? What’s wrong with nuclear power? What’s wrong with damming rivers to generate hydroelectric power? What’s wrong with burning mountains of coal to make electricity? What’s wrong with using pesticides, genetic engineering, or cloning to increase food production for a growing human population? What’s wrong with six billion people each wanting to own a suburban house, a car, and all the modern conveniences? What’s wrong with wanting to be a millionaire? What’s wrong with a democratic form of government operating like a capitalistic business? What’s wrong with large corporations giving large investments of cash to help politicians get elected to representative offices? What’s wrong with corporations owning the news on TV and radio, the print media or the internet? What’s wrong with mega-mergers or monopolies? What’s wrong with having a strong national defense to protect our vital multi-national interests around the world? What’s wrong with making the world safe for capitalism? What’s wrong with proselytizing, demonizing, or neutralizing anyone who says there’s something wrong with the way things are and stands in the way of materialistic, capitalistic progress?
What’s wrong with me that I believe that some things are wrong with capitalism and that everything is not all right? What’s wrong with me that I dare to doubt? What’s wrong with me that I question the way things are and the powers that be? Why do I worry? Why do I care? Why can’t I accept the way things are and be happy? Why should I bother believing that things could be better and that we need to change? Why should I stick my neck out or put my nose into other people’s business? Why don’t I just mind my own business? Why not try to escape into the woods, or why not escape into booze or drugs, or TV, or sports, or sex on the Internet, or gambling, or romance novels, or shopping? Why is it impossible to separate myself from society? Why can’t I just be happy with all that I have? Why do I have to worry about the sick and the sad, the hungry, cold, lonely, and tired? Why do I have to be concerned about social injustice and environmental destruction? Why can’t I just save myself? Why do I have to try to save the world, too?
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The most common view of what will happen if our man-made systems fail to keep this world in absolute order is that there will be absolute chaos.
Human history has been a story of evolutionary movement away from nature’s chaos and human disorder. This has been the fear that has pushed us forward and away from the past. This view has inspired humans to create legal and economic systems, scientific and technological methods, and religious and governmental institutions. Nature was seen as wild, harsh, unpredictable, and in need of taming and domestication. Humans were seen as wild savages or barbarians who would kill, rape, and plunder others unless some reasonable system of law and order was established.
Western civilization and capitalism was built upon the Old Testament law of Moses. Moses led his followers out of Egypt to escape enslavement by an unjust system developed for the Egyptian rich and powerful. He and his followers found themselves lost in the wilderness, homeless, hungry, and afraid. Moses created a system of laws to prevent chaos. But the laws and economic order evolved to protect the people who had the most power and the most wealth.
Capitalism starts with the premise that people will and should act in their own economic self-interest. It sets up a system that favors and protects the most wealthy and powerful. It imposes order on natural resources by dominating them and placing them under the control of those with the most capital.
America was created by a group of wealthy landowners rebelling against the unfair taxes and laws of England. American constitutional law was developed by rich white male landowners who created a government of the landowners, by the landowners, and for the landowners. All landowners were created equal with certain inalienable rights. Women, children, slaves, Indians, and the poor were denied access to the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The economic systems of communism and socialism have not been able to compete with the greediness of capitalism or convert capitalism into a more equitable, just system.
So far, Christianity has also failed to change the economic, social, and environmental injustice of capitalism. Christianity started as a revolt against the Roman Empire rule of law. Jesus led the revolt. Jesus wasn’t crucified to save us from our sins or to save us from hell. The people in power crucified Jesus to scare the hell out of anyone else who dared to question the authority and privilege of the rich and powerful, or the system of laws that keep them rich and powerful. Jesus was crucified because he challenged the system to change, to be fair and just, to be kind and caring. Jesus believed that a vision of heaven could truly exist here on Earth. Jesus gave hope and courage to all those forgotten or mistreated by an unjust system. Jesus was crucified because he asked those of wealth and power to fairly share their wealth and power with all. Jesus was crucified because he and his followers were beginning to demand changes to the system here on Earth.
Jesus is long gone now and probably way overdue to return. If he were to come back today, “What would Jesus do?” Would he mind his own business being a carpenter or would he be the storyteller that he was? Would he be outraged by the injustice of the economic system of the rich and powerful? Would he turn the tables on the moneychangers? Would he dare try again to change the laws of greed and self-interest with a revolutionary vision of love?
These days, capitalism creates the illusion that all is going so well: stock market up, corporate earnings up, inflation low, job creation high, and unemployment low. People like capitalism; they believe in it. Capitalism offers hope to all that they, too, can be millionaires. Money seems to offer the only hope for salvation from pain and suffering.
Capitalism is all that we are left with. It has destroyed all the competition and now holds a monopoly on belief systems. What’s the alternative to what seems to be the only option?
Capitalism would have us all believe that the only alternative to its laws and order is complete economic and social chaos. We would have to deal directly with the reality of a harsh, wild, and unpredictable nature which we have evolved from and worked so hard to avoid. Capitalism now controls nature, society and the world economy.
Much has been gained but much has been lost as capitalism has progressed.
To enumerate the losses:
1. We have traded our mystical delight and awe of nature for the convenience of technological inventions.
2. Instead of being part of nature we are now parts in an economic, social machine.
3. We used to be members of a community of faces. Now we are consumers in a world economy, interacting with things, machines, and abstract information.
4. We have forfeited spiritual wealth for material wealth.
5. We have lost our humanity. We have lost our ability to empathize and to help others heal. We have lost our capacity to see or feel the suffering of others that we have caused, directly or indirectly, by our belief in the rules of capitalism.
6. We have lost our ability to get outraged by the injustice done by our exploitation of nature and most of society’s workers.
7. We have traded our true freedom for slavery.
8. We have forfeited our privacy to the capitalistic systems that know and monitor every detail of our lives.
9. We have sold our chance to have a true democracy.
10. We have made it almost impossible for anyone to voice their care, concern, or their criticism about capitalism.
11. We have traded our wisdom for more information and more knowledge.
12. We have lost our ability to create a vision of a new future. We cannot see an alternative to capitalism.
Those in power with the most wealth are the least able to see that there are terrible things wrong with their capitalistic beliefs. It is not in their self-interest to see or change the problems of capitalistic injustice. They want the future to be more of the same. Their heads are filled with profit margins, stock prices, decisions about which companies to buy out, how to sell more for more, how to create larger demands through advertising, how to find cheaper raw materials and labor.
It is not just the very rich who have difficulty seeing capitalistic injustice caused by greed, it is also the middle class and the have-nots. We all want more and more. We all struggle to try to survive in a commercial world where we are constantly being sold a bill of goods. We all buy into it. We all compete against everyone else to try to get enough. How much is enough? How much do we each need to feel secure in a commercial world that is selling us more and more? How much do we need to create the illusion of security and happiness? How much wealth of information and material things do we each need to keep ourselves preoccupied so that we can be self sufficient, and oblivious to the plight of the planet and the poor?
Everyone is part of the capitalistic problems. No one is free. Those with the most money may believe that they are free but they are the most enslaved. The poor constantly struggle for mere survival.
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Who can stand outside the materialistic capitalistic system long enough to see it clearly? Who can get themselves free long enough to see the injustice of it all? Who can escape long enough to become pure at heart and pure in spirit? Who can stand up to the system and ask for liberty and justice for all?
If everyone acts in their own self interest in our capitalistic world economy, whose job is it to worry about the injustice and destruction caused by the system? I don’t see Adam Smith’s invisible hand taking care of everyone. Whose job is it to be free to see, and then to help others see and be free? Who can afford to see the truth? Who can afford to act freely upon the truth? Whose job is it to lead society forward to a place of liberty and justice for all?
Is it the politician’s job? Maybe. It was a possibility. I’m not sure it is anymore, though. Democracy had a chance to counter-balance capitalistic greed, but that chance may have been lost. The government is part of the capitalistic system, creating and enforcing laws that benefit those with the most money and power.
The rich and powerful corporations have everyone fooled into believing the government is interfering with everyone’s self interest. The capitalists have everyone focused on how much the government is taking in taxes. They know that if they can keep the middle and lower classes focused on stolen taxes, then the people won’t focus on and become outraged at being overcharged for goods and services while being underpaid for their labor, with little or no benefits. The capitalists have gotten the middle class to focus on reducing welfare for the poor while they work the politicians to increase corporate welfare handouts and tax loopholes for the rich.
Politicians and the government are being pushed to play by capitalistic rules of self-interest and self-responsibility. Capitalism can’t or won’t provide for common needs and can’t or won’t let the government provide for the common good because capitalism focuses everyone’s attention on self-interests.
Capitalism has demonized, neutralized, and taken over the government. There still may be a remote chance that a politician could move the government to take action in the name of the poor and powerless.
What about the church and the clergy? Is it their role to preach change? The church seems to have given up on justice and liberty for all on earth. They preach that things will be different in heaven. Their hope is to collect enough money to keep their own bureaucratic budgets out of debt. Some clergy preach guilt and fear to force their members to give. The capitalists and now the government are trying to guilt the churches to take care of the poorest poor. They want faith-based organizations to take over the liberals’ safety net programs, to save them, (the capitalists), the expense of spending on the poor. The capitalists want the churches to provide the basic needs to the poor and to teach them to be thankful, meek and mild, and to ask that their sinful souls be saved and, for God’s sake, to make sure they don’t get outraged and riot for justice.
Who else can speak out against environmental and human exploitation? What about the artists, musicians, writers, poets and philosophers? Most of them are too busy trying to make a living like everyone else. Most artists are working to entertain and please the rich rather than enlighten them. Perhaps there are still a few artists who know and understand the pain and suffering caused by capitalistic injustice and try to use their art to speak out against it, offering hope for change. Most of them, however, can easily be ignored and kept starving.
Who then is left to voice the concerns of the powerless poor and the defenseless Earth? Who is left to lead the way into a new way of living together on this precious Earth? Are there any prophets left to speak for those in need? Perhaps only a poor beggar with nothing left to lose would dare ask the powerful wealthy for some change, for real change. Perhaps one poor beggar, asking for help, asking for compassion, asking for justice, could change the future. Maybe that’s all it would take for change to happen: just one poor beggar asking the multi-national corporations to surrender and share their wealth and power. Perhaps, with love in their hearts, they will finally wake up and realize it is the right thing to do, the just and wise way to live. Maybe it could be that simple.
Or perhaps the one beggar gets one or two others, or four, or five billion beggar friends to join together to ask for change. Perhaps then and only then will the rich and powerful, with fear in their eyes, be willing to surrender and share power and wealth because they realize they can’t continue to unjustly take and withhold it from others any longer.
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I’m not a violent man, never have been and hope that I never need to be one. I believe in non-violence as the way to change.
When I was 16 years old, I was looking at the reality of turning 18 years old and being drafted to fight and kill for my country in a war against the communistic North Vietnamese. After reading Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” I decided I would not join the war if I were drafted. In 1972 when I turned eighteen, the war was winding down and my government did not order me to fight and kill. I have been haunted by Thoreau’s words in “Civil Disobedience” ever since. And since that time, I’m sorry to say that I have supported many wars and much injustice by my inaction, cowardliness, and passive support of the capitalistic rules of the rich and powerful. Like everyone else I know, I, too, am a slave to this society.
As an artist and nature lover, I’ve had moments of escape that led to insights and enlightenment. I have often sought to distance myself from society as far and as much as I could, to protect and save myself. I cannot, in good conscience, totally escape society forever, and I cannot, in good conscience, totally live in society without trying to change it forever.
Back in the 1960’s and early 1970’s there was a sentiment voiced, mainly by the believers in the war and the status quo, of the American way. People, buttons and bumper stickers would say, “America—love it or leave it.” I have never found America totally easy to love or to leave. And now these days, after the total corporate takeover of America and the world, it is impossible to totally love or to totally leave. I have always believed America could become better. I voice my criticism of America’s capitalistic flaws because I love America.
I have worked all my life: in my relationships, in my job, and in my art, to make America and this world a better place to live. I love America perhaps more for what it can become, than for what it is. My wish is to make it better. I do not wish to leave it the way it is. As Thoreau says in “Civil Disobedience”:
But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.
In 1846, Thoreau refused to pay a tax as a way of demonstrating against the government’s support of slavery and the unjust war with Mexico. He was then thrown in jail. Thoreau formulated his philosophy of non-cooperation in his essay, “Civil Disobedience,” which directly inspired Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. to change society by methods of non-violence.
I wish to remember Thoreau’s words. I wish to keep his words alive, to be inspired to be brave, courageous, and conscientious. I wish to quote Thoreau further. The words he wrote in “Civil Disobedience” need to be heard. They are as true now as they were then.
It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said, that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. […]
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. […]
Others—as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders—serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.[…]
Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels? […] I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn. […] I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name—if ten honest men only—ay, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefore, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever. […]
If just one honest person or one poor beggar were to stop being a slave to capitalism ... but oh, how can one break free? We are so tied and chained to society’s system and capitalistic ways. Who can afford to break free to go to jail?
Seen from a lower point of view, the Constitution, with all its faults, is very good; the law and the courts are very respectable; even this State and this American government are, in many respects, very admirable, and rare things, to be thankful for, such as a great many have described them; but seen from a point of view a little higher, they are what I have described them; seen from a higher still, and the highest, who shall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all?
It’s too soon for me to escape forever. I’m stuck here for now. I’m connected to this world in which I live. I’m forced to give it some thought. I have broken free long enough to see what an unreal, abstract illusion this man-made machine of our capitalistic world government is. Knowing it to be an illusion has set me free to imagine a better world.
Again I quote Thoreau, “Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.”
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What kind of a world would I like to live in? These are the environmental changes I hope to see happen in the world:
1. Consciously reduce the world population. The growth rate is killing us all. It is unjust to expect the planet to feed, clothe, house, and materialistically accommodate so many humans reproducing so rapidly.
2. Control and direct science to significantly reduce air, water, and land pollution. We need to reduce energy consumption and support environmentally clean energy practices that rise above the profit motives of exploitation.
3. Stop the expansion of cities and suburban sprawl. Immediately place a moratorium on expanding city limits. Build up not out.
4. Expand wilderness areas for protection. Expand protected lands under guarded multi-use supervision, with emphasis placed on preservation rather than resource extraction. Return human-altered lands to nature in a restored condition.
6. Reclaim and expand green spaces within cities. Create buffer zones on the edges of cities with parks, recreation, woods, and farm lands.
7. Reduce big city populations. Relocate a portion of the population to small towns without expanding small town suburban sprawl. New technologies and business practices can help with this relocation.
8. Expand the number of farmers and people involved directly with a sustainable landscape without further urbanization of rural land.
9. Teach and practice the concepts of respect, rethink, refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, restore, and renew worldwide.
10. Respect and value all other life forms and the environment we share, being very careful with man-made science and technological alterations. We need to be aware of the interconnectedness of nature. What we do here effects what happens there. We need to value the ecology more than the economy.
11. Regularly participate in nature through recreation, escape, and renewal in non-destructive ways that change people and not nature.
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Within my short lifetime I’ve seen thousands and know of millions of acres of nature destroyed and changed forever. These areas of wilderness had existed for millions of years, flowing with the evolutionary changes of nature. Then men and their machines arrived and went to work, acre by acre, cutting down trees and plants, digging, scraping, and blasting away at the earth. Sometimes the men got what they wanted and left, but most often they got what they wanted and stayed. They built a road or a city or a suburban subdivision or a new shopping complex or a farm of corn or beans or cotton or meat. The process happened quickly and in total disregard for nature. Far too many of these men believed that nature had no feelings, and they, therefore, had no feelings for nature.
In the old days machines and technology were primitive and simple. The labor needed to alter nature was much greater. Perhaps then there was more respect and reverence for nature. Perhaps there were also some rituals of thankfulness for what the Earth offered. Perhaps I am just romanticizing the distant past. The point I want to make is that capitalism has not only destroyed the Earth, it has destroyed our ability to have respect, reverence and thankfulness for the Earth. We are no longer grateful—we are greedy. We can thank capitalism for this. It has become so easy to destroy nature. We must change our capitalistic ways before we lose our chance to change forever. I hope it’s not too late already.
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As quickly as capitalism has destroyed nature, it is destroying our human nature. Capitalism is a system built on a patriarchal model of organizing the world. Capitalism has imposed this system, which is based on competition, upon the world. It is a system that is basically unkind, unjust, and immoral.
Capitalism believes that competition brings out the best in people, qualities like hard work, new ideas, new inventions, customer services, and low-cost products. I believe that the competition of capitalism creates a few big winners and a lot of losers. Capitalism thrives on everyone aggressively competing against everyone else, while giving everyone the illusion that they can be one of the lucky winners, if they do their best to beat the competition. Losers must submit to the rich and powerful.
The qualities that capitalism rewards are competition, aggression, success, rugged individualism, domination, self-interest, and lack of empathy. These are traditional male attributes. They now rule the world.
Does capitalism really bring out the best in people? At what cost? Who are the losers and what have we lost? Isn’t there a better way to live?
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In capitalism’s aggressive advance to win the economic, ideological, and materialistic wars, many human qualities traditionally associated with and safeguarded by women have been destroyed. Women have always been forced to live in the dominant male world view. However, in the last century, women have been forced to give up what they valued and safeguarded to enter the work force. We as a society have now lost most of our ability to care for and prioritize children, families, relationships, community, the sick, the elderly, and those in need. Empathy has been replaced by envy in our capitalistic system. We are too busy helping ourselves to help others.
In our capitalistic system, those who directly take care of human needs, the teachers, daycare providers, nursing assistants, social workers, maids, waitresses, cooks, and secretaries generally receive wages considerably less than those who work with machines, manufacturing, marketing, or selling monetary abstractions. Helping others has been replaced by customer services. Healing others has been taken over by managed care organizations. The bottom line is that business cares only if it’s profitable.
Capitalism has made a business out of how to fake care and concern for customers to sell them more stuff. Some corporations give a token donation to a charity, and then spend a lot of money advertising how generous they are and how much they are interested in others. Most of these corporations focus only on their own self-interests. Capitalism cares mainly about making large, quick, and steady profits for investors. This type of capitalism cannot afford to care about anything else.
The capitalistic system forces us to suppress and forfeit the qualities of compassion, care, empathy, cooperation, community, nature, and spirituality. These are human qualities that I wish to remember, recognize, restore, and reward. We have lost our ability to love. We must change the capitalistic system of governing. Does the system need to change first before we are allowed to be human, or can we become more human first and then change the system? The capitalistic system makes it almost impossible to change or to change the system. I want to believe that I can change and that I can change the system.
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Thus I propose that everyone’s abilities are recognized and rewarded fairly and everyone’s basic needs are recognized and met fairly. The income gap discrepancy between the very rich and the very poor needs to be greatly reduced. There should be limits placed on how much one person or one corporation can monetarily possess, control and conglomerate.
Capitalism rewards the investor at the expense of labor and the environment. Cheap labor and cheap resources have resulted in systematic disrespect for workers and the environment, causing degradation, destruction, and spiritual suffering. We need to create a system that invests in its workers. All workers should be paid fairly with good income, insurance, vacation time, and retirement funding. Workers should have more income so that they, too, can become investors, not just consumers. Workers should be given more time off to invest in relationships, family, community, recreation, thinking, and enjoyment. Workers should not be paid so little that they should have to live from paycheck to paycheck, unable to save.
Capitalism does as little as possible to reward workers. Capitalism makes workers into slaves of stockholders, disposable parts in a money-making machine. Capitalism believes that the only incentives for people to work are economic self-interest (greed) or to avoid economic poverty (need). The former are the business men, the latter are their slave laborers. Capitalism wants to keep most of the capital in as few hands as possible. Capitalism will do whatever it takes to keep control of most of the money and most of the power.
Capitalism has taken control of democracy. Capitalism does not believe in true democracy or in the concept of one person, one vote. Capitalism believes that those who own 1000 stocks, receive 1000 votes. Workers need to be rewarded with more economic wealth and greater political power. This can be accomplished only by the rich and powerful sharing fairly or by workers demanding justice. Can the democratic process be of any help to workers? I’m not sure anymore. Workers are too busy working to have time to get involved in the democratic process that is now mostly controlled by the corporate capitalistic system. Workers feel powerless and hopeless to change the system.
I wish to see the capitalistic system provide a dignified standard of living and health care to all those who truly cannot work: the sick, the disabled, the retired, the elderly, and children.
I wish all workers would feel connected to and thankful for the labor of all other workers worldwide. Respecting worker’s rights should know no borders.
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I have thus offered what I believe to be a better, more ecological and humane way to live, and what I most want changed about our capitalistic world government. I’m not asking for much. I only ask for what seems right. I wish this life to be fair and just. Is that really asking for too much? Maybe, maybe I am a dreamer, an idealist. The capitalists might marginalize me by calling me a communist, or they might cut me down by calling me a tree hugging environmental extremist. They might claim that I’m trying to incite a riot of workers. I am a peaceful person who wants the world to change and who wants to change the world for the better. I believe in love more than I believe in anything. I believe we can be moved by love to move closer toward love. Love is really quite simple. So too, are justice, fairness, true freedom, and spiritual wholeness.
In our human evolutionary progress out of what we perceived as chaos and disorder, we built an orderly economic world of laws using knowledge, reason, science, and technology. We now live in a world where we are totally controlled by the capitalistic system we have made. And it is all computerized. It has really become quite complex, so complex that it seems to be constantly on the verge of collapsing back into chaos. We now fear the stock market crashing more than we fear any natural disaster or man made ecological calamity. I am beginning to wonder if I might not prefer to live in a state of chaos rather than the totalitarian state I find myself in. Is this the only choice we have, to live in chaos and disorder or to live under totalitarian corporate control?
I want to believe we humans are evolving towards something better. I want to believe that we can create something better for ourselves. The world I envision is a worldview Henry David Thoreau lived and wrote about in “Civil Disobedience” and Walden. It is a way of living based on “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”
How in the world can we live like that when our capitalistic economy has become so complicated?
Thoreau’s reply: “Simplify, simplify.”
Easier said than done. But—it’s really quite simple. Instead of living for money, simply live in love.
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I am reminded of two stories about the rebel, Jesus, as told in the Gospel of Matthew. In the first story (also mentioned by Thoreau in “Civil Disobedience”) the political Pharisees try to trick and trap Jesus by asking him,
‘Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?’ But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, ‘Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the money for the tax.’ And they brought him a coin. And Jesus said to them, ‘Whose likeness and inscription is this?’ They said, ‘Caesar’s.’ Then he said to them, ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’ (RSV, Matthew 22: 15-21)
When Thoreau did not pay his tax to the government, he was locked in jail. Thoreau wanted to do his part to prevent the government from taking what did not belong to the government.
Today, Caesar’s symbolic image seems to be everywhere and on everything in our corporate capitalistic world. Caesar seems to have seized almost everything and everyone.
What is left for God? What is left of God?
The other story about Jesus has the Pharisees again trying to find a legalistic pretext for seizing Jesus and locking him in jail. A Pharisee asked Jesus:
‘Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?’ And he said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.’ (RSV, Matthew 22: 34-40)
Where is God? Who is God? What does God want? How do we know God? How do we love God? I am unsure of the answers to these questions. I do not profess to intimately know the who, what, where, or how of God. I do know that they sometimes lock people up who say they hear the voice of God talking to them. I also know that for centuries people have been fighting wars in the name of their gods, killing each other for not professing the right God.
I do not wish to fight about God. That never did seem to me the best way to love God. But what do I know?
I know that I love nature and nature loves me. Nature is around me and in me. I am nature. I breathe, drink and eat nature. I move through nature and nature moves through me. We intimately know each other. I am not afraid to profess my love for nature. I am, however, afraid for nature. I fear the ways in which we humans are destroying nature and isolating ourselves from intimacy with nature. I hate the way our materialistic capitalistic system makes it almost impossible to spiritually love nature.
There is only one nature. It is the same nature all around the world. It is all connected. We must reconnect ourselves to nature if we humans hope to survive and live in a world worth living in. We have forgotten how to love nature. Loving nature can connect us to our hearts, souls, and minds. Perhaps loving nature can connect us to loving God.
Connecting with nature can help us connect with our neighbors. We have become alienated from our neighbors because of our self-centered competitive capitalism. We need to slow down our lifestyles and take time to get to know our neighbors. Perhaps we can learn from nature that we are all connected to nature. We all live and work in the same world. Our common survival depends on our common love of nature and each other. We need to cooperate and help each other meet our basic needs and resist self-centered greed.
We need to expand our definition of who our neighbors are to include a respect and a reverence for all life forms. We are all interconnected and share the same world. We need to love our neighborhood as our own home.
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I wish to live in a simpler world. I want to believe that it is not too late to change our capitalistic ways. We humans are still evolving and we can learn from our mistakes. We can create enlightened social, legal, economic, and environmental systems based on choices of love instead of capitalistic greed.
I see the seeds of hope. There is a growing awareness that this planet is in danger and that we humans need to change. There is much each of us can do to simplify our lives. Every day, in many small significant and symbolic ways we each can choose to live in love. One act of love will inspire another act of love. This way of love will continue to grow. Love can be that simple.